GENDER PAY REPORTING
“The use of the 12 week average for hours is a mistake in the regulations – the hours worked in the snapshot period should be used as these will match the pay in the snapshot period”
A 12th hour amendment was made within ACAS/GEO guidance that allowed for the term ‘reasonable’ as allowing for use of the actual hourly rate where a worker did not have a set working pattern (and thus an average over a 12 week period would normally be used to establish the hourly rate) and the hourly rate was known.
For workers with irregular hours the use of the 12 week average could result in a significant distortion in the hourly rate to be used.
It was too late to amend regulations but non-statutory guidance was able to be amended and we are grateful to the GEO team for understanding and responding to representations made by affected software developers.
Nevertheless Regulations need to keep abreast of real world situations – and non-statutory guidance – when Parliamentary time allows.
As this policy develops together with the development of further annual pay reporting, the GEO should develop early working relationships with software developers to ensure that products can be developed in time to support employers with data extraction, calculations and their reporting obligations.
Established forums and relationships do exist, such as HMRC Software Developer Support Team, and should be utilised to ensure that timely working and consultation with software developer’s takes place.
Further comments made include:
“Our [payroll] software outputs the raw data for each employee from which our customers can calculate the required measures. We’ve had no negative feedback about this so far. It appears that customers prefer to have the full detail so that they can see how their measures are derived and also check for anomalies in the data.”
“The regulations have the unintended consequence that employers can no longer make a payment which cannot be linked to a relevant length of time.”
Case study 3 – public sector
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THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PAYROLL PROFESSIONALS
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